Do You Think This Is Strange? (29 page)

He loves you.

From across the park, she laughed out loud.

It's time for me to go.

are you going?

Yes.

Tell me you want me to come with you.

No. Stay with your mom.

Okay.

But we can swing, if you want.

Squeak.

I walked out from under the trees.

I opened my eyes.
The Butcher stood behind the counter, his head tilted to the side. I stood in the middle of his store, my hands at my side.

“Well, well,” he said. “If it ain't the cat, and if the cat ain't dragged itself in.”

“I'm not a cat,” I said to him.

He wiped his hands on his apron. “Ain't seen you since months. Where you been?”

“I got stuff.”

He nodded. “Is that a fact?”

“Hey, Dad, we need to order more gloves,” said Jack, walking out from the back, carrying a bucket. When he saw me, he came to a complete stop.

His father looked between the two of us. The only sound was the ticking clock above the counter.

“Well, this is awkward,” the Butcher said softly and turned away from us.

Jack sniffed. He set the bucket down.

“So,” he said.

“So,” I repeated back to him.

“Did you graduate?” he asked.

I nodded. “I'm enrolled at Douglas Technical College. I start in September.”

“Not bad, not bad.” He looked around. “I'm taking some time off. Help around the shop.”

“You were runner-up in the Golden Gloves.”

His eyebrows went up. “You been stalking me, Freddy?”

I shook my head. “I googled you. I was your sparring partner. I have a specific interest.”

He smiled, and his shoulders relaxed. “Sounds like something you would do.”

“You know,” said the Butcher, “I recorded Ali versus Norton last week. Maybe you might want to come and watch it with us, Freddy?”

I shook my head. “I can't.”

“Sure you can,” he said gently.

“No. I have to meet a friend. She's waiting for me.”

Jack laughed. “A girl. You
dog
.”

“I'm not a dog.”

“I know.” He nodded. “I know.”

Silence. The Butcher turned away again and began wiping the counter.

“I could come tomorrow,” I offered.

The Butcher looked at Jack, who looked at him, then at me.

“Sure. We've even got beer.”

“I don't like beer.”

“You like beer when you sit with us,” he said.

“Okay.”

Another silence.

“I need a job,” I told Jack.

Jack looked at his father. “We do need someone to clean up in the evening.”

His father nodded. “That we do,” he said. “That we do.”

My mind continues to race.

—

I was there. That night. I was right behind her when she died.

I was in the back seat, and my last memory is a fleeting thought, the instant before the car slammed into a truck, stopped at the train crossing. The collision ploughed the truck into the train's path, and it was carried down the track. The car I was in took the truck's place in line. Tick-tick-ticking.

At the moment of impact, there was a thought. It faded away even after everything went black. The thought was this: my mother, in the front seat, has blocked the flying glass.

If you asked me what was the last thing I remember about that night, I would answer this: I remember thinking that my mother was protecting me. I remember her scream, the stuttering of the car as John Stiles stood with all his force on the brake pedal, the spray of glass and a thundering noise as I was thrown forward against my seat belt. Then I remember my eyes closed, and I saw nothing, and heard nothing.

But I remember one last thought, still lingering, that she had, once again, protected me.

—

My mother wore lilac perfume. It smelled purple. When I nestled against her, watching
TV
, her scent enveloped me like smoke around a campfire. Sometimes, if I pass someone in the hall at school who is wearing my mother's perfume, I stop and become alarmed. I feel her presence with me, as if she were right behind me.

I have long since given up turning around to see if she is there.

—

After the night when I remembered, Linda Stiles visited my father only once. She came in the evening, and they sat in the kitchen and drank. They thought I was in my room. I was on the stairs.

“Did you know?” she asked him.

“About where they were going? No. I didn't.”

The clink of ice cubes. The clunk of a bottle on the table.

She sighed. “The thing is, I've lived ten years, Bill. Ten years thinking he left me. Thinking that he didn't leave because of Saskia. Thinking that he left because he couldn't take life with
me
. And he took Saskia with him.”

“I spent ten years thinking the other way,” he said and laughed softly. “I guess we're trading each other's story.”

When she left, my father didn't get up from the table to see her out. I was sitting on the stairs that led down to the front door.

“Hello, Freddy,” she said. “You're looking well.”

“Am I?” I asked.

—

Listen
: There is no evidence of life after death and, therefore, no reason to believe in life after death.

There is no evidence of God's existence, but that doesn't mean the world isn't consistent with Him. Because it is. The things you expect in a God-filled world are here: unexplained events, good triumphant over evil, prayers answered, and other astonishing happenings.

In science, it's called stochastic. In religion, it's called a miracle. Regardless of the label, it's still there. These things happening in this world.

There is no evidence that my mother is anywhere but buried in the ground. There is no evidence that my mother still exists on some other spiritual plane.

But my need to justify the existence of God is clear. If there is no God, I will never see my mother again. If there is a God, I will see her again.

This is sufficient. This is enough to believe.

All of this is important. It is my justification. It is the only thing that keeps the threads about my mother to a minimum.

We're going to go now
, the threads say.

I know the perfect place to leave you, I tell them.

—

I open my eyes
and I am sitting with Saskia Stiles. We are in the forest behind my old house, high up the mountainside. We are sitting at the foot of the cliffs, under an overhang, looking across the valley as the rain falls around us.

In my left pant pocket is my father's talisman. I took it when I left. He doesn't need it anymore, but I do.

On my lap is my old friend,
The Twentieth Century in Review
, and I am flipping the pages back and forth, back and forth.

Saskia takes her phone from her purse.

The woods are lovely, dark and deep.

“I'm dry,” I say. “Are you dry?”

I'm dry.

We sit together, and I feel our shoulders touching. They have been touching for a few minutes.

I've just noticed this.

She continues to type text messages. I sit and listen to her tap at her phone, and I count twelve text messages sent. At last. At last I have to ask.

“Who gets those messages?”

She pauses, hunched over her phone.

God.

I don't respond. An earlier version of me may have pointed out that she didn't have God's contact information.

Then she sends another message to God.

“What did you say to him?”

She pauses again and looks up, out across the valley. The mist is rising from the ground, and the mountains in the distance are dissolving in white.

“What did you say to him?” I ask again.

She looks at me. “Amen,” she says.

And she leans in to me, until she is close enough to me that I feel her light breath tickle my upper lip. She is looking directly at me, straight into my eyes.

I tumble into their blue.

Her eyes close.

High above, thunderclaps rolled across the sky. Up the side of the mountain, I hear the clamouring crashes as trees bend and snap, the trolls slowly walking down the mountain.

And it's okay.

Listen
: These are the people who form the chain.

I know that this book would never have been written if it weren't for my wife, Joanna. She was the first person who made me want to be more than I was. She was the first person who made me want to finish this book, because she was the first person I wanted to read it.

My first and greatest mentor was my mother, Donna Milner, who has this strange ability to make those things I struggle with look easy. This book got out of the gate because she read the first chapter, early, early on. If her emailed response could have had volume, it would have been turned up to eleven:
keep writing this damned thing
.

The author Anthony Dalton was the first to tell me “You are going to be published.” He was the first outside my family to say that this was a good book, the first to say that someone needed to read it, and the one who introduced me to Taryn Boyd, my publisher.

Taryn Boyd was the first person to see me as more than someone who wrote something they liked. She saw me as someone she could make money off of. Every writer's ultimate goal. She also saw me as something no one had called me before:
literary
. Every writer's and all that.

Taryn demonstrated some kind of prestidigitatious genius when she paired me with Colin Thomas, my editor, because he turned out to have an unnerving knack of knowing where the bullshit was. My book has been a lengthy process of cutting off the unnecessary fat, and Colin was a master at separating the tissue from the bone.

I need to thank more people than there is room here, but I'll include most of the cream: Wanda Ann La Claire was the first person outside of my family to read and edit my book, and her help was much appreciated. Tracy Wilkinson, my boss, who put up with my angst during our weekly reviews. And then there was the stranger at the Surrey International Writers' Conference, when I was pitching the book to agents, who overheard me and said, “Are you the guy writing that book about the autistic kid?” I said I was, and she said, “You keep going. Everyone's talking about it.” That was the moment I glimpsed that maybe this book could eventually be read by complete strangers. Again, every writer's ultimate goal.

Be sure to visit
aaroncullydrake.com
for outtakes, bloopers, and deleted scenes.

AARON CULLY DRAKE
has written for newspapers and magazines, and is a former reporter and editor. He lives in Vancouver, British Columbia, with his wife, son, and autistic daughter, all of whom keep advising him to shut up.
Do You Think This Is Strange?
is his first novel. To learn more about Aaron and the book, please visit
aaroncullydrake.com
.

Copyright © 2015 Aaron Cully Drake

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—electronic, mechanical, recording, or otherwise—without the prior written consent of the publisher or a licence from the Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency (
ACCESS
Copyright). For a copyright licence, visit
accesscopyright.ca
.

Brindle & Glass Publishing Ltd.
brindleandglass.com

LIBRARY AND ARCHIVES CANADA CATALOGUING IN PUBLICATION
Drake, Aaron Cully, 1967–, author
Do you think this is strange? / Aaron Cully Drake.

Issued in print and electronic formats.
ISBN
978-1-927366-39-4 (html).
ISBN
978-1-927366-40-0 (pdf)

Editor: Colin Thomas
Copy editor: Cailey Cavallin
Proofreader: Grace Yaginuma
Design and cover image: Pete Kohut
Author photo: Cristie Hasselbach

Excerpts from “Comfortably Numb” written by Roger Waters and David Gilmour. Copyright © 1979 Roger Waters Overseas Ltd. in the
US
and Canada, and Pink Floyd Music Publishers, Inc. Administered by Warner-Tamerlane Publishing Corp.
All Rights Reserved. Used with permission.

Every effort has been made to contact relevant copyright holders for lyrics quoted in this material. Please contact [email protected] for more information.